Even though I tried to keep my computers running as long as possible, I've had quite a few in the past years. Here I have a few pictures and some infos for the more important ones...

Commodore PC10 (1991)

This was my first PC, with amazing two 5 1/4 inch floppies and CGA graphics and a tiny monitor.

Commodore PC10

486-SX 25 Vobis Colani Design PC (1993)

This was at least a computer! VGA graphics and later a Soundblaster card, this was already great for gaming, until DOOM and Descent came out.

486 DX2-66 Desktop (1994)

Faster, better design (the Colani design sucked big time) ... one computer I had a long time and basically changed everything from floppies, hard disks, graphics cards and soundcards, and finally also the board and processor to an 486 DX2-80.

Medion (Aldi) Laptop (1999)

A cheap, but surprisingly fast and nice laptop. Had a mobile Intel processor (with SpeedStep functionality) in it. Used to take it everywhere, also on my longer bike rides with my Triumph Tiger from Dresden to Leuven and back. After the infamous "Buechersturz" (where it was buried under a lot of heavy books) it just wasn't the same. The screen died and so did the notebook...

Targa Visionary 2400+ (2004)

After my old laptop became a victim of the great "Buechersturz" in Dresden I got a Targa Visionary Laptop (from Lidl).

Targa Visionary

For the Targa, I wrote a small tutorial for setting up Linux on the Targa in german. With the latest SuSE Linux I tried the laptop was fully supported and didn't need any extra tweaking. So the tutorial is only kept here for historical reasons.

Acer Ferrary 4006 WLMI (2006)

My current notebook - really fast, excellent design... let's see how long it lasts. Seems installing Linux on it requires a bit more manual labor (pretty much as for the Targa Visionary right after it was out). I'll need to find some time to re-attempt the installation.

Acer Ferrari

For people with interest on doing manual upgrades on any of the the Acer Ferrari 4000 series, here's the service manual that covers changing the hard drive, upgrading the memory and general dissassemling/fixing of the Acer (mail me if you are interested in the manual).

Installing WLAN Drivers on the Acer

Installing WLAN drivers is still not fully automated, so here are the steps for setting up WLAN on the Acer Ferrari 4000 with openSuse 11.

Preparation:

Download Acer Broadcom Drivers from Acer Support page (version I used Broadcom_3.100.46) and extract to some local directory.
Install package ndiswrapper with YAST.

All the following commands have to be typed as root. Type

install_bcm43xx_firmware

to install the firmware drivers.

Now start ndiswrapper from within your drivers directory

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf
modprobe ndiswrapper

To diagnose, whether it worked or not, use any of the following commands and read the output:

ndiswrapper -l
lsmod
dmesg
iwconfig

Save the configuration for later use:

ndiswrapper -m

Now you can configure the network connection with NetworkManager. You may have to reboot once to get this working.